The 4 Best AI Alternatives to ChatGPT

As great as ChatGPT is, its early lead in this space has led to it becoming a generic stand-in for all AI tools. Like Xerox, Kleenex, and JELL-O in their respective spaces, it’s crowded out awareness of so many other worthy platforms. Which is a shame because the first step in using AI effectively is to choose the right tool for the job.

And so here’s a quick tour of four other tools for specific jobs:

1) You Need Current Data

Try searching ChatGPT or most AI tools for “What PM jobs are open in Chicago today?” and you’ll quickly run up against the limits of its training data:

So if you want to leverage the power of AI and the power of live web search, the two best players are, unsurprisingly, the two biggest search engines: Google (Bard) and Bing (Bing Chat).

While I’ve found Bing Chat to be more effective (it’s powered by OpenAI’s most powerful GPT-4 model, which you’d normally have to pay $20/month for) it is currently limited to use via Microsoft’s Edge browser and its own smartphone app. Whereas Bard, also free, is available everywhere.

2) You Need Citations

As you’ll notice in the Bing Chat example above, it often provides footnotes for its sources - something that ChatGPT never does.

This is important not just from an academic perspective, but because it helps reduce hallucinations by forcing the AI to cite actual, verifiable sources.

And so if verifiable results are essential to your search (e.g., “What research has been done on the efficacy of a two-page resume?”), I really like Perplexity because it’s baked a focus on citations into its results more than any other AI tool:

3) You Need to Upload or Produce a Massive Amount of Text

Let’s say that you have a resume book for all your students and you want to get a sense of the most common backgrounds and skills for your new class. That way, you can give your employer partners a taste of where your students are coming from.

While you could look through hundreds of resumes yourself and try to pull out patterns, that would be both tedious and fairly unscientific.

And while you might be tempted to just paste the entire file into ChatGPT and hope for the best, that massive amount of text will far exceed its limits:

So to solve this quandary, instead turn to another free tool: Claude. Claude has a much larger “token window” - which basically means it can digest much more text and even whole files up to 10 MB.

And so this once-impossible task is now a piece of cake:

4) You Need to Analyze a Large Dataset

While ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) is the only paid service I sometimes recommend, it does have one superpower that can make it worth the price of admission: It can analyze massive data files the same way a professional Data Analyst might.

For instance, let’s say that you have a giant CSV with all your LinkedIn connections exported. And you’re curious which industries and job titles you have the deepest penetration with.

Again, instead of manually eyeballing it, you head over to ChatGPT Plus’s Advanced Data Analysis tool and upload the CSV. And now, because ChatGPT can write Python and analyze the data, you’ve got all your answers right away:

PS: Feel free to share with your colleagues! And if you ever want me to lead an AI training for your students?or colleagues?this year, just say the word.